After the loss of Classcraft, I used an excel spreadsheet that I got from EMC2 to continue gamifying my Math and Science classes by giving students roles to play, XP to earn, and levels to achieve. It did the work and I was still able to take my students on Star Trek themed adventures as they learned 6th grade Math and Science. Then GPTs got so good at programming with mere prompting that I gave a go at creating a Classcraft-like, Star Trek, gamification site of my own. I’m pretty happy with what Claude Code built for me as I gave it a vision of what I wanted to do.
On that site I can add assignments to give students XP, I can add badges to acknowledge student successful completion of units, and I can have a boss battle where Operations officers can protect their teammates from taking damage by using their shields, Medical officers can heal their teammates, and Engineering officers can provide dilithium crystals to their teammates so they can use their shields and medical equipment during an attack!
Students can use their accounts to sign in to the starship portal to get a quick view of all their assignments to keep track of their XP and their level and officer ranks. During a boss battle, students can use their abilities right from their personal log portal.
Here’s how it all works:
One other thing that Classcraft did exceptionally well was work like a full functioning Learning Mangement System or LMS by making assignments into beautiful branching quests. It was truly quest-based learning (QBL) and that is one thing I have not even attempted with my Star Trek site. That seems like too much and for now, Google Classroom serves well as my LMS for pushing out assignments to students and keeping track of their progress.
As a bonus, I had kids use School AI and Canva to make character cards for their Starship Equinox roles! That was a fun activity that introduced students to AI use in school for a specific purpose, the School AI Space, and using a Canva template to use their AI generated character images to make their character cards.
